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Brad Growden of New Orleans just discovered that today (or was it yesterday?) was world sibling day. He’d never heard of it, and neither had I, but it was a good excuse for posting this photo of himself and his siblings on Facebook. Trouble is, stuff posted on Facebook is often impossible to find after yesterday, and this one was too good not to share, so to all Growden and Growdon cousins out there, here are your New Orleans cousins.

For those who want to know the details, Thomas Bradley GROWDEN (& siblings) and Stephen HAYES are 4th cousins 2 times removed. Their common ancestors are William GROWDEN and Elizabeth Couch SAUNDERCOCK, who were married at St Meubred’s Church, Cardinham, Cornwall, England on 26 November 1792.

Brad is descended from William, the eldest son of William Growden and Elizabeth Saundercock (or Sandercock), who, with his son Henry, emigrated from Cornwall to Australia. Henry Growden later moved to New Zealand, and his son, the Revd Arthur Matthew Growden was a missionary who travelled all over and eventually settled in Tennessee, USA. One branch of his descendants moved to the New Orleans area of Louisiana, while another went to Alaska. Brad’s great-aunt, Monica Louise Deragowski, who collected much of this family history, said someone had once told her that in Cornwall the Growden families were so close that they traded roosters. That certainly isn’t the case today, where the different branches are widely scattered.

My own branch are not so widely scattered. Matthew Growden, the fourth son of William Growden and Elizabeth Saundercock, seems to have stayed in Cornwall all his life, and died in the Bodmin Workhouse at the age of 83. His son William Matthew Growden (my great grandfather) emigrated to the Cape Colony in about 1876, where he became a platelayer on the Cape Government Railways, eventually rising to the rank of permanent way inspector.

Andrew and Catherine Scott (cousins on the Growdon side of the family) are cycling around in South America, and have started a blog Two Scotts on the trot, where you can follow their adventures.

Cycling round South America, but a lift can help if there’s a headwind

As they put it, “A trot, yes, but on our ‘burros de aceros’ (iron donkeys)… a “cheap-as-we-can” cycling-camping expedition around southern South America.”

Thursday 20th August saw two firsts. We obtained our first hitchhike (owing to a nasty headwind and dry heat) with a friendly gentleman, an electrical engineer, who was heading as far as Wanda, which happened to be a perfect destination. It gave us enough distance to cycle to Iguazu, but without having to spend a week getting there. The drive also turned into a Spanish lesson. We unloaded in Wanda and gratefully thanked him. It was then we noticed Andrew’s bicycle’s back tyre was completely flat. Our first puncture.

Betty Hannan, aged about 14, in the back row, married first John Fowler, and then Robert Stewart. Ella Growdon, aged about 15, in the back row, married Frank Hayes, and is the mother of Steve.

Janet Growdon (born Hannan), aged about 43, was the mother of Ella and Phyllis in the picture, and the aunt of all the other children. Agnes Hannan (born Irvine) was the mother of Betty and Nan (the baby in the picture). Nan was the mother of Peter Badcock-Walters.

Ivy Sharp, aged about 10, married Chris Vlok, and Arthur Vlok is their son. Phyllis, aged about 9, married Dennis Solomon in 1950, but they were divorced about two years later and had no children. Peggy Sharp, aged about 12, married Ted Gascoigne, and had a daughter Brenda.

Peggy and Ivy’s mother Emily Sharp (formerly Mould, born Hannan) is not in the picture.

The picture was probably taken at Durban beach, or at least some beach in Natal, and judging from the ages of the children, was probably taken in the summer of 1925/26.

Val and I have just returned home after a holiday trip to the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Free State, which lasted just over three weeks. It was very much a “seeing people” holiday, and we saw old friends and cousins we hadn’t seen for many years, and some family members we had never met before. We left on Bright Tuesday, 26th April 2011, and travelled through Springs, Nigel, Balfour, Villiers, Frankfort and Bethlehem to Clarens, where we stayed at the Cottage Pie B&B, and visited Dons and Anneke Kritzinger and Toni Badcock-Walters, wife of my second cousin Peter Badcock-Walters, who was away in New York.

On 27 April we drove to Graaff-Reinet, and were struck by the deterioration of the road and rail infrastructure caused by road transport deregulation — — the Free State roads were particularly bad. We stopped at Aliwal North for lunch and Val ate a venison pie under the reproachful gaze of a gemsbok whose head was mounted on the wall above. In Graaff Reinet we stayed at Villa Reinet, run by Hannan cousins Nick and Ailsa Grobler, but Ailsa was away, visiting her son in Dubai. We spent two nights there, and on Thursday visited the Valley of Desolation and Nieu Bethesda, which is famous for its Owl House, but deserves to be more famous for its beer, which is much better than the insipid chemical concoctions produced by SAB-Miller.

On Friday 29 April we drove to Barrydale and stayed overnight at the Watercourt Lodge, and saw an old friend Dick Usher, whom I had known when he was a journalist on the Daily News in Durban in 1969, and a member of the Christian Institute youth groups.

On Saturday 30 April we had a shorter trip to Robertson, where we visited cousin Sandy Struckmeyer (nee Vause) and her daughter Kerry, and then went to the Orthodox Centre established by Fr Zacharias van Wyk, who has converted an old packing shed into the last homely house, with a chapel attached, where we stayed the night and had Vespers, Matins and Divine Liturgy in a mixture of Afrikaans and Dutch.

After Liturgy on Sunday 1 May we drove to Hermanus, where we stayed at the Volmoed Community for four days, and I spend a lot of time with John de Gruchy, another old friend, discussing our proposed book on the history of the charismatic renewal in South Africa.

On Thursday 5 May we went to Villiersdorp, where we spent a couple of nights, and visited Val’s sister Elaine Machin and her friend Averil
Anderson, and on Friday went with them to Genadendal and Greyton where we had lunch, with magical misty mountains all around.

On Saturday 7 May we went to Cape Town and stayed at the Formula 1 hotel on the Foreshore, and visited Richard Girdwood, now Rector of St Michael’s Anglican Church in Observatory, whom we had known in Durban North in the 1970s. We had supper with Val’s first cousin Gail Stierlin (formerly Farqhuarson, formerly Alldred, born Terblanche) and met her husband Gustav Stierlin for the first time, and Gail’s mother, Val’s aunt Pat, was staying with them.

On Sunday we went to the Divine Liturgy at St George’s Cathedral in Woodstock, where I served with Fr Nicholas, and afterwards had lunch with Renfrew Christie at the Foresters Arms in Rondebosch. I wasn’t sure whether I had met him before or not, but I certainly knew of him from the 1970s. Then we went to Simonstown to visit more Hannan cousins, Arthur and Jean Vlok, and met their daughter Anthea for the first time. We had met their son-in-law Julian Buys on an earlier visit in 2003.

The next three days we spent mainly in the archives, doing family history research, and had supper with Erica Murray, another old friend, whom I had first met in 1964, but had not seen since she went to Canada in the 1980s. We also saw His Eminence Metropolitan Sergios, the Archbishop of the Cape of Good Hope.

On Thursday 12 May we left Cape Town early in the morning on our return journey, travelling eastwards on the N2 to Knysna. It was misty much of the way, and at one point we saw three bright lights, which we at first took for lights on a mountain, but when we didn’t pass them and as they went higher in the sky realised were stars or planets. No other stars were visible, just those three in the east, which were quite magical. One was certainly Venus (Lucifer), but I’m not sure what the other two were. We caught the tail end of a news item on TV saying that it was a quite rare conjunction of Venus, Jupiter and Mars (or was it Mercury?).

We spent a couple of nights at Knysna, and saw my first cousin Glenda Lauwrens (nee Growdon), her husband Brian and daughter Joanne, whom we hadn’t seen since they moved to Knysna from Ladysmith 21 years ago. We also saw Val’s father’s first cousin, Patrick Clark, and his wife Carol, whom we had never met before.

On Saturday 14 May we drove to Port Elizabeth, and were forced to use a toll road (boo! hiss!) for the only time on our trip, as the Bloukrans
Pass was closed. In PE we had tea with David and Mary MacGregor. David was formerly the Anglican Dean of Pretoria, and we had not seen them since the 1980s. We had supper with Val’s aunt Nat Greene, On Sunday we went to the Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Dormition, and afterwards went to lunch with Dimitri and Marguerite Paizis, and stayed talking with them the whole afternoon.

On Monday 16th May we drove to Stutterheim via Port Alfred. At Bathurst we tried to visit Lindsay Walker, an old BBS friend, but did not have his address. We got a phone book at the post office and called the only Walker listed in Bathurst, but there was no reply. At Stutterheim we stayed with Growdon cousins, Hamish and Monica Scott. Their son Robbie runs a nursery and an eco-lodge called “The Shire”, and we spent the night in one of the splendid cabins at The Shire.

On Tuesday 17th May we travelled to Burgersdorp via Cathcart, Queenstown and Molteno. We had driven through Burgersdorp on the way down, and wanted to see more of it, and so spent the night there.

On Wednesday 18th May we retraced our route to Clarens over the horrible Free State roads, and Wepener was as dirty and run-down as Burgersdorp was neat and well kept. This time we stayed with Toni Badcock-Walters (my second cousin Peter was away again, this time in Namibia), but we met their son Craig, and Peter’s half-sister Louise Philp, and caught up on a lot of family history information. It was election day for the local government elections, but there was no way we could get home in time to vote, in spite of a flurry of urgent SMS messages from the Democratic Alliance urging us to vote for them so they could take the City of Tshwane. I thought it was a bit presumptuous of them to assume that we would vote for them.

On Thursday 19th May we drove the last leg homewards, via Petrus Steyn Heilbron, Vereeniging, Heidelberg, Nigel, Springs and Bapsfontein. We stopped in Petrus Steyn to visit church friends Danie Steyn and his mother, who gave us mushroom soup for lunch.

Well, that’s the outline, but we will also be posting more detailed accounts, with pictures, on our various blogs, perhaps after the pattern
of Cobbett’s “rural rides”.

On our holiday travels we have turned homewards again. On Thursday 12 May we left Cape Town and travelled to Knysna, where we visited my cousin Glenda Lauwrens (nee Growdon) and her husband Brian. We also saw Glenda’s daughter Joanne and her children John, 8, and Kate, who is nearly 6. We hadn’t seen Glenda, Brian and Joanne since they moved to Knysna 21 years ago, and had not met Joanne’s children at all. Glenda’s father, Stanley Growdon (1918-1995), was my mother’s youngest brother.

The next day we went to Sedgefield see Val’s dad’s cousin, Patrick Clark, and his wife Carol. They are related on the Greene side; Patrick’s mother, Gladys Clark (1907-1997), born Greene, was the younger sister of Val’s grandfather Allan Dudley Greene (1893-1942).

Carol & Patrick Clark and Val Hayes; Sedgefield, 13 May 2011

On Saturday 14 May we travelled to Port Elizabeth, where we visited Val’s aunt Nat Greene, the widow of her uncle Roy Greene (1923-1975). Nat gave us the news that her granddaughter Samantha Greene had married Wayne Greenhaigh on 22 Apr 2011 at Cambridge Methodist Church in East London, but Nat had been unable to attend, as she had flu at the time.

Nat Greene and Val Hayes, nee Greene; Port Elizabeth 14 May 2011

Today we’re planning to leave Port Elizabeth for Stutterheim, where we hope to see another cousin on the Growdon side of the family, Hamish Scott.

My great grandfather William Matthew Growden or Growdon (1851-1913) came to the Cape Colony with his family in 1876. They came from Cornwall to work onthe railway from the Eastern Cape to the interior, and several more children were born in the Eastern Cape. He retired to a farm near Bethulie, then sold it and moved to Queenstown, where he was killed when the cart he was driving overturned. Many of his descendants are still in South Africa, while some are now living in Canada, Australia, and even back in the UK.

William Matthew Growdon had two younger brothers and an older sister. One brother, Simeon, died young. The other, Mark Dyer Growdon, married Elizabeth Dymond on 1 Jan 1882 and died the following November. They do not seem to have had any children.

The elder sister, Elizabeth Ann Growden (1849-1871), married Nicholas Kendall, a sailmaker of Mevagissey in Cornwall, and had one daughter, Elizabeth Kendall, before she too died. Nicholas Kendall married another Elizabeth and they then had three more kids (that confused me for a while — I thought all the Kendall kids shown in the 1881 census were related, until I discovered the elder Elizabeth had died).

So Elizabeth Kendall, born about 1870, would have been my closest Growden relative left in Cornwall. She would have been about 6 when her uncle William Matthew Growden and all her cousins departed for the Cape.

And today I discovered that she married William Henry Barnicoat in St Austell, Cornwall, in 1895.

I haven’t yet discovered if they had any children, but I hope they did. See Update below! That opens the possibility of more cousins on the Growden side of the family that would be closer relatives than all the others left in the UK after William Matthew Growdon left there. All the other Growdens that remained were descended from William Mathew’s uncles. We’ve been in touch with some of them over the years.

I hope that if any descendants of William Henry Barnicoat and Elizabeth Kendall see this, they will get in touch.

There remains one other interesting possibility.

In 1824 a Joseph Growden married a Ginney Barnicote. He was a member of a Growden family of Warleggan and St Neot, and some of the descendants of that branch moved to Sheffield in Yorkshire. Perhaps there’s a link somewhere that will show the connections of both families.

Update 23 Nov 2010

I’ve discovered that William Henry Barnicoat and Elizabeth Kendall had at least two children:

James Growden Barnicoat (born 1897)

William Ronald (or Roland) Barnicoat (born 1901)

They were my mother’s second cousins, the only second cousins she had on the Growdon side, and I wonder if she even knew of their existence. She never mentioned them, to my recollection.

Qute a few nenbers of the Growden/Growdon family seem to have made names for themselves on the stage, or in musci, and here’s a news item that mentions another one — Bryony Growdon. Does anyone know where she fits in the family tree?

Leander Club has a reputation for producing some of the world’s best rowers and also possesses scenic dining facilities as an inspiring backdrop. On Thursday, July 22 at 7.30pm Leander hosts original music theatre in the form of The Divine Divas.

Actresses Yvonne Delahaye, Bryony Growdon and Vicky Poole all possess a professional acting pedigree and were thrown together by fate and bring their experience to the roles of jobbing actresses in Matheson Bayley’s original musical play Lights, Camera, Resting.

The musical comedy debuts at Leander and charts the struggles, heartbreaks and conflict of Jax, Suzie and Rachel. The Divine Divas sum up what the Henley Fringe Trust sets out to facilitate, which is the opportunity for young talent to leap the barriers and bring enjoyment to the performers and